Abstract: This paper presents a novel formulation, which derives in a smooth minimization problem, to tackle the rigid registration between a given point set and a model set. Unlike most of the existing works, which are based on minimizing a point-wise correspondence term, we propose to describe the model set by means of an implicit representation. It allows a new definition of the registration error, which works beyond the point level representation. Moreover, it could be used in a gradient-based optimization framework. The proposed approach consists of two stages. Firstly, a novel formulation is proposed that relates the registration parameters with the distance between the model and data set. Secondly, the registration parameters are obtained by means of the Levengberg-Marquardt algorithm. Experimental results and comparisons with state of the art show the validity of the proposed framework.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel CNN-based architecture, referred to as Q-Net, to learn local feature descriptors that are useful for matching image patches from two different spectral bands. Given correctly matched and non-matching cross-spectral image pairs, a quadruplet network is trained to map input image patches to a common Euclidean space, regardless of the input spectral band. Our approach is inspired by the recent success of triplet networks in the visible spectrum, but adapted for cross-spectral scenarios, where, for each matching pair, there are always two possible non-matching patches: one for each spectrum. Experimental evaluations on a public cross-spectral VIS-NIR dataset shows that the proposed approach improves the state-of-the-art. Moreover, the proposed technique can also be used in mono-spectral settings, obtaining a similar performance to triplet network descriptors, but requiring less training data.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach to remove non homogeneous haze from real images. The proposed method consists mainly of image feature extraction, haze removal, and image reconstruction. To accomplish this challenging task, we propose an architecture based on transformers, which have been recently introduced and have shown great potential in different computer vision tasks. Our model is based on the SwinIR an image restoration architecture based on a transformer, but by modifying the deep feature extraction module, the depth level of the model, and by applying a combined loss function that improves styling and adapts the model for the non-homogeneous haze removal present in images. The obtained results prove to be superior to those obtained by state-of-the-art models.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach for estimating the shortest Euclidean distance from a given point to the corresponding implicit quadric fitting surface. It first estimates the orthogonal orientation to the surface from the given point; then the shortest distance is directly estimated by intersecting the implicit surface with a line passing through the given point according to the estimated orthogonal orientation. The proposed orthogonal distance estimation is easily obtained without increasing computational complexity; hence it can be used in error minimization surface fitting frameworks. Comparisons of the proposed metric with previous approaches are provided to show both improvements in CPU time as well as in the accuracy of the obtained results. Surfaces fitted by using the proposed geometric distance estimation and state of the art metrics are presented to show the viability of the proposed approach.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach for colorizing near infrared (NIR) images. The approach is based on image-to-image translation using a Cycle-Consistent adversarial network for learning the color channels on unpaired dataset. This architecture is able to handle unpaired datasets. The approach uses as generators tailored networks that require less computation times, converge faster and generate high quality samples. The obtained results have been quantitatively—using standard evaluation metrics—and qualitatively evaluated showing considerable improvements with respect to the state of the art

Abstract: This paper presents a novel algorithm for mobile-object segmentation from static background scenes, which is both robust and accurate under most of the common problems found in motionsegmentation. In our first contribution, a case analysis of motionsegmentation errors is presented taking into account the inaccuracies associated with different cues, namely colour, edge and intensity. Our second contribution is an hybrid architecture which copes with the main issues observed in the case analysis by fusing the knowledge from the aforementioned three cues and a temporal difference algorithm. On one hand, we enhance the colour and edge models to solve not only global and local illumination changes (i.e. shadows and highlights) but also the camouflage in intensity. In addition, local information is also exploited to solve the camouflage in chroma. On the other hand, the intensity cue is applied when colour and edge cues are not available because their values are beyond the dynamic range. Additionally, temporal difference scheme is included to segment motion where those three cues cannot be reliably computed, for example in those background regions not visible during the training period. Lastly, our approach is extended for handling ghost detection. The proposed method obtains very accurate and robust motionsegmentation results in multiple indoor and outdoor scenarios, while outperforming the most-referred state-of-art approaches.

Abstract: This paper presents a new model for the task of scene text visual question answering. In this task questions about a given image can only be answered by reading and understanding scene text. Current state of the art models for this task make use of a dual attention mechanism in which one attention module attends to visual features while the other attends to textual features. A possible issue with this is that it makes difficult for the model to reason jointly about both modalities. To fix this problem we propose a new model that is based on an single attention mechanism that attends to multi-modal features conditioned to the question. The output weights of this attention module over a grid of multi-modal spatial features are interpreted as the probability that a certain spatial location of the image contains the answer text to the given question. Our experiments demonstrate competitive performance in two standard datasets with a model that is faster than previous methods at inference time. Furthermore, we also provide a novel analysis of the ST-VQA dataset based on a human performance study. Supplementary material, code, and data is made available through this link.

Abstract: This paper presents a new method for person-specific face shape estimation under varying head pose of a previously unseen person from a single image. We describe a featureless approach based on a deformable 3D model and a learned face subspace. The proposed approach is based on maximizing a likelihood measure associated with a learned face subspace, which is carried out by a stochastic and genetic optimizer. We conducted the experiments on a subset of Honda Video Database showing the feasibility and robustness of the proposed approach. For this reason, our approach could lend itself nicely to complex frameworks involving 3D face tracking and face gesture recognition in monocular videos.